In the world of big business, Michael McLintock is precocious in the extreme. Just two years into the job of trying to revive one of the most illustrious names in retail finance, he has pulled off one of the richest and certainly most audacious deals in the industry. Yet the man who got top dollar from Sir Peter Davis, chief executive of Prudential and one of Britain's toughest business leaders, will not turn 38 for another fortnight.
It is a birthday he is likely to celebrate in style, however. His shares and options in M&G suddenly have a nominal value of nearly £2 million under the terms of the Pru's takeover offer. The august financial institution clearly has its eyes on McLintock for even greater things, and is not shy of digging deep when it wants something.
It is paying £25 a share for M&G - about 40 per cent more than the market value of the shares - and its offer document boasted that 'Prudential attaches great importance to the key employees having appropriate, performance- related remuneration.' McLintock also seems to have negotiated a hands-off agreement with the Pru which stressed its intention to leave him and the M&G team very much to their own devices to continue building the business as they have been.
Although McLintock is credited with turning M&G around and instituting the biggest shake-up in its near 70-year history, that laurel is more in the anticipation than as a tribute to achievement. Yes, he does seem to have taken the business by the scruff of the neck, drafted in some big-hitters and blown the dogma out of M&G's way of doing business.
Its 'value' approach to active investment, similar to the approach taken by Tony Dye's Phillips & Drew, and its determination not to put a large proportion of its funds into trackers has meant its performance has been less than spectacular, however. The first shoots of recovery were apparent in last year's results, when profits rose 13 per cent to £76 million, and there was a slowing in the rate of unit trust redemptions. But McLintock himself has warned that the going could be tough this year.
The group will be trying to weather these choppy waters with a new master breathing down its neck when most of its members have made it clear for a long time that they value independence.
McLintock recently ventured the hypothesis that being shareholder-owned had helped the business focus and suggested that the sector's experience of big daddies was not encouraging. Indeed, the performance of Mercury Asset Management and Phillips & Drew of late has not encouraged the notion that big corporations are happy homes for fund managers.
It may have been his ideas about independence that made him address M&G's 900 staff at its London and Chelmsford offices on the day the takeover was announced, rather than doing high-profile media interviews on what was immediately seen as a fantastic deal for shareholders.
'He was fantastic in staff presentations,' said an insider. 'He told them it was the efforts of every one of them which had resulted in such a brilliant deal. He would die if he thought he was seen as claiming the credit for this.' Although some in the industry regard McLintock as abrasive - one senior executive described him as 'a bit of an aggressive sod' - he is acutely aware of the need to nurture his staff if the business is to succeed. This is not management school dictum. It is an apparently genuine belief that every member of staff at M&G has contributed to the firm and enabled it to net £1.9 billion from the Pru.
Tall, wiry and taut, McLintock shuns personal publicity - his press office jokes that spoof suggestions of an interview with Hello! magazine are enough to make him turn pale. His official curriculum vitae says simply that he is married, and his staff clearly regard the idea of revealing his wife's name as treachery. It is like pulling teeth to discover that he lives 'somewhere in London', and if he suspected he would be identified as the brother of the Bishop of London it would probably induce apoplexy.
Yet McLintock is a charming man who gives business interviews willingly - and is open, relaxed and far more willing to discuss issues relating to his company than many a managing director.
Some pension-fund managers say he is 'arrogant', but this probably reflects the fact that McLintock may find difficulty talking at a certain level. For one thing he runs the business, not the funds; he is not an investment manager. Second, he is ferociously intelligent. His 10 O-Levels, five A-Levels, four S-Levels and first from St John's College, Oxford, give little indication of his piercing and sometimes intimidating intelligence.
Clearly, however, his staff do not feel they have to grovel in front of this mastermind. 'He's great. Yes, he's incredibly dedicated, but he's got an easy sense of humour and people like him,' said one.
The compliment is reciprocated. McLintock is proud that people like to work for M&G and he boasts that staff turnover rates are low for the industry, at about 12 per cent. 'People have a real affection for M&G, and that runs right through the office. They all want us to be top dog.' He will be aware of the possibility that the collegiate culture he has worked so hard to create, the meritocracy on which he thinks much of M&G's success depends could be blown out of the water if the Pru is too heavy-handed. He will need all his personnel skills to keep M&G on course, particularly when attention has immediately focused on the possibility that Vivian Bazalgette, its respected investment chief, might be the first casualty of the takeover.
Bazalgette was a critical early appointment when McLintock moved up from head of M&G's international desk to the managing director's slot in 1997.
The investment high-flier was one of the people who turned Gartmore from a small to mainstream player, but he found the ownership of a big corporation - Gartmore is now part of NatWest - constricting and standardised. His flair and judgment were tramelled, and he was happy to join McLintock in a much more prominent, if somewhat tricky, position at M&G. Keeping him could now become a measure of McLintock's leadership qualities.
His current chairman, Rod Kent, refuses to comment officially on the heights to which his youthful managing director might climb in the new environment. He says simply: 'I'm sure the Pru is meritocratic, and ability will rise to the surface.'
On the rise
Born: March 24, 1961
Education: 10 O-Levels, 5 A-Levels, 4 S-Levels, 1 first class BA (Hons).in Modern History and Economics
Career: Lightning has struck where McLintock recently passed, although this is no doubt a cruel coincidence. He joined Morgan Grenfell after business school and worked in the investment management and corporate finance departments from 1983 to 1987, and then for Baring Brothers from 1987 to 1992. That was enough little jobs, so he joined M&G in 1992 and moved into the top slot in 1997
Status: Married without children (information black-out)
Hobbies: Hard to believe time allows for any, but he lists ball sports, country sports, walking (black-out on favourite haunts) and reading (black-out on favourite authors)